Wide load

I'm very happy you've picked up this newspaper to read; however, my subject this week is our companion enterprise, thedailypage.com, home of Isthmus on the web. (Also reachable through isthmus.com.) It's going through some updates that began debuting this week.

The first thing that should strike you is that it's now a full-size website, i.e., it is considerably wider than it used to be. This accommodates the addition of one more tab to the top tool bar, for our new feature "Neighborhoods."

Also new are the drop-down menus under "Mad Tools" and the neighborhood tabs. These will have further choices in the future as neighborhoods are added and the Mad tool chest expands. Coming soon in that category is an advertisers index listing all of our advertisers from any medium in a products/services directory.

Another upgrade is new Forum software. I know some Forons may dispute that something new is an upgrade, but they'll come around. The fact is, software needs to be upgraded from time to time to allow for security improvements and when old versions are no longer supported.

Last April we conducted a readership survey: One version printed in the paper; there was another version accessible from the website; and the final piece was a random phone survey looking for readers. There were interesting differences among the three groups' responses.

When folks were asked where they went for information, the telephone respondents mentioned numerous sources, but the internet and newspapers were the predominant answers. Respondents to the in-paper survey unsurprisingly preferred to get their information in print and were pretty happy with the paper as is. They were not so sanguine about the website, complaining about the efficacy of searches and general difficulty in navigating the site. Site search capacity has been improved since the spring.

The online survey folks liked to get their info on line. They were much happier with the functionality of TDP. Still, they wanted more. We're working on it.

One interesting revelation from the survey was that a surprisingly large number of people do not know the paper can be read online. Copy from the week's paper starts going up on Thursdays and continues through Sunday until all non-syndicated material is available for reading. And each week's paper automatically becomes part of the archive when it is uploaded. The archive now contains 114 issues, going back to August 18, 2006.

There's gold in that there website, but sometimes you have to dig for it.